The Ark is Peter Scupham's latest collection of poems, following his Selected Poems and Watching the Perseids, both published by Oxford in 1990. The poems explore questions hovering on the borderlines of "is" and "seems," life and death, truth and lies. Scupham's ark is steered to "its safe and certain loss" with a freight of dreams, memories, terrors, gifts; it is a habitation that carries him through varied landscapes and weathers to a possible Ararat.Three very different sequences hold the collection together: an experimental sequence, "Accident," followed by "Annunciations," and "A Habitat," a group of poems loosely surrounding the retrieval of an old house from its ghostly past. Imaginative in theme, authoritative in language, The Ark is a fascinating collection by a firmly established and much-admired poet.